Once Upon A Mattress
by Hunsdon
Summary: "Castle shifts for the thousandth time. The ancient, sagging, stinking mattress shifts with him, rolling her hip hard into his and knocking their knees together. She's bruised already, but she comes up smiling. She slithers a little lower, trying to make room. It's hopeless, but she's smiling." Episode insert for Once Upon a Time in the West (7 x 07). One-shot.


Title: Once Upon a Mattress

Rating: T

WC: ~1.600

Summary: "Castle shifts for the thousandth time. The ancient, sagging, stinking mattress shifts with him, rolling her hip hard into his and knocking their knees together. She's bruised already, but she comes up smiling. She slithers a little lower, trying to make room. It's hopeless, but she's smiling." Episode insert for Once Upon a Time in the West (7 x 07)

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><p>"Everything about this is just . . . <em>wrong<em>." Castle shifts for the thousandth time. The ancient, sagging, stinking mattress shifts with him, rolling her hip hard into his and knocking their knees together. She's bruised already, but she comes up smiling. She slithers a little lower, trying to make room. It's hopeless, but she's smiling.

"Not everything." She turns her head a fraction of an inch, and her lips are pressed into his skin. She tastes the salt of his sweat. The tang of coffee and whisky they lived on all day. It's too hot to eat, and the mess fare isn't exactly inspiring. It's pretty miserable. It should be, anyway. She's the one who didn't want to do this _at all, _but there's something about the narrow bed and the candle burning down on the nightstand.

"Not everything," he echoes. She feels the sharp inhale of his breath as her tongue darts out and back again. The shift of the bed—the whole damned thing—as his ribs expand and crowd them even closer together. He curls his fingers over her shoulder to sweep the hair back from her face. "But this bed is the _worst._"

"It's not that bad, Castle." She can hardly believe the words coming out of her own mouth. She's sweaty, and the stupid, frilly shift the ranch left hanging on the back of the door clings to her lower back and _still _somehow manages to be unbearably scratchy. She's uncomfortable as hell, but there's something about being with him like this. Something so absurd that it topples over into perfectly _them, _and it keeps bubbling up in her. _Joy._ "After all, we're cuddlers."

"Cuddlers." He sounds bitter. She bites her lip and tries not to laugh. This stopped being a turn-on for him around the time the sun went down, and paradoxically—_perversely_, as he's said more than once—she's the one who's smiling now. "Name one bed in the world — " He wriggles his shoulders hard enough to land her back on top of her least favorite spring. " — in this or any other universe that is worse than this one, Beckett."

"Hmmmmm." The sound rumbles between them. She trails her toes up his bare calf, thinking there are advantages to the ridiculous striped nightshirt housekeeping left for him. "How about . . . mattress on a dirty basement floor, ten feet from a hungry tiger?"

"Not _even _worse," Castle scoffs. He captures her fingers and raises her wrist to his lips. "I have _very _fond memories of that mattress. First time we woke up together."

She shivers at the image. The visceral recall of _want_ fizzing all through her. The thick, sleepy rumble of his voice.

_D__on__'__t get up yet. Stay in bed. _

She's back in the moment. Dizzy panic falling away, no match for desire—the almost irresistible urge to lower her mouth to his. She doesn't resist now. She surges up on one elbow. She twists and falls on him, kissing him hard. The bed springs squeal. The headboard thumps the wall. Everything shudders dangerously. He kisses her back, just as eager, even though he's muttering something helpless and half-hearted about Tobias.

The thought of their friendly neighborhood gay cowboy bursting in via the jack-and-jill bathroom, dampens the mood a little. A very little. She drags herself down his body, pulling a groan from somewhere low in his belly as she eases herself to the side. She tucks her nose against his neck and memory stirs again.

"Not the first time." She sucks at his skin. Worries it between her teeth. She dots a trail. A tight, spiraling path. "The tiger wasn't the first time."

"Was _too_! Totally the first time." He's indignant. He tries to squirm away, insistent on making his point, but there's nowhere to go. The mattress heaves and dumps him back in the middle. "Like I would _forget_ the first time."

He tenses almost before the word slips out. _Forget. _The candle sizzles out at last. It's like some kind of omen, but she's not having it. She's not having any regrets right now. Any doubts or second guessing about them at all.

"Except you did forget." She gives his neck a final nip and pulls back a little. "White light. Missing time. Front seat of my cruiser?" She roughs her thumb over his skin, still moist from the touch of her mouth. She pictures color blooming, though it's too dark to see. It gives her an adolescent thrill, thought of her mark covering the spot where his pulse thumps even now. "Shame, Castle. You forgot."

It works. She thinks of the hundred times he's done exactly this for her. Pulled her up and out of dark places with playfulness. Memory. This time it's her doing it for him, and it works. He rolls her body under his in a move that's somehow _not _clumsy, even though it sets the whole bed frame bucking and swaying. A move that somehow has blood rushing hard through her veins even though the rusty squeal of springs fills the room.

"First of all . . ." He yanks the ruffled neck of the shift aside. He pays her back in kind, and with his mouth on her skin she forgets all about Tobias and tlhe spring digging into her spine. She forgets her own name. "I did _not_—I could_ never_—forget that." His mouth travels to her ear. "The way you looked at me . . . "

"_Me . . . _I . . . _you _were . . ." The words barely make it past her lips for all the breath he leaves her. "Looking."

"I was looking." He shifts his weight. He looms over her, a sudden movement the bed doesn't like at all, but he doesn't seem to notice. All of his attention is fixed on her. It makes her heart pound. This sudden focus of his and the way his world narrows down to just her. It makes her heart pound. It always has, even when it shouldn't have. And right now, she's fiercely, violently glad of it. Fiercely, violently glad that it's her ear he pours his words into. All his desire. "I'd been looking for along time."

He kisses her, and it's all sweetness and want. No regret, and no room at all for everything they weren't back then. He kisses her like there's never been a moment when he wasn't in love with her. He draws back, and it's too soon. She wants him, but he's dropping to the side of her. Propping himself on his elbow and dragging his fingers all along her side.

"So. You concede then?" He sounds pleased with himself. He _looks _pleasedwith himself as far as she can see by the the little bit of moonlight that makes its way through the frosted glass.

He certainly _tastes _pleased with himself when she tugs his mouth back down to hers.

"Never," she says fiercely, but she can't remember what this is about. Not really, with their bodies tossed together like this. "Concede what?"

He laughs loud enough to drown out the bed springs and the rapid-fire slam of the frame against the wall as he scoops his arms around her. "It's adorable that your first instinct is still—after all this time—to fight me."

"Adorable, huh?" She pinches his ear, hard enough to turn his self-satisfied chuckle into a yelp. "Concede what?"

"You changed the subject." He snatches her wrist. He pins the offending hand high over head and nudges at her fingers until they curl around the rickety bars of the headboard. "Beds to bench seats . . ."

"There hasn't been an American-made car with a bench front seat since . . . "

". . . And now semantics—not that semantics aren't a total turn on." He trips his fingers down the pale, sensitive underside of her arm. "But you obviously concede." He stretches up to drop a kiss at her wrist. "Worst." Another kiss, lingering this time in the crease of her elbow. "Bed." He roughs his cheek against her bare shoulder, his nose just barely grazing the swell of her breast. "Ever."

Her breath catches. Her heart is too full, suddenly. There's something about the intimacy of his forehead pressed to her collarbone and the stupid mattress practically folding in half. Rising high on either side of them. She feels the warmth of his breath stirring the scratchy fabric of her stupid shift, and she loves this moment—the bed and the heat and the scratchy fabric and all. She loves all of it fiercely.

"It's a great bed," she says. She tugs at his hair.

It's a little too savage. His head pops up and his mouth falls open. He's set to complain or tease or argue the point, maybe, but he stops short. He sees something on her face or tastes it in the air between them. Maybe not _it _exactly. Even she doesn't know what _it _is exactly, though though her mind is crowded with stiff hospital sheets and the threadbare quilt on the bed at her dad's cabin.

"There are _worse_ beds," he says, finally, and the grand gesture of it—the magnanimity—is just right. It makes her laugh. It chases whatever it is away.

"Hot wife included, I have to give it that." He slips carefully on to his side. He reaches over her to tug the pillow this way and that. He kicks at the coverlet where it's bunched around their knees and fans it out. He settles back. The frame sighs and comes to rest. "You win, Beckett. It's not a _bad _bed."

She curls into his body, utterly content. Pleasantly weary and strangely comfortable at last, but she can't help pushing it a little. "The _best _bed, Castle."

"Hmmmm. Right now," he murmurs. His chin wags up and down once. A nod. He's drifting off, and his voice is a thick, sleepy rumble. "Best bed."

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><p>AN: I don't think this actually works in the episode, as they have their aborted campfire nookie the first night, and I don't think they actually slept in the single bed, but I couldn't get past "We're cuddlers" without something glurgey. Thanks for reading.


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